May, 2017

Glibness. People who make glib, hollow remarks like “both leading political parties are the same” or “voting in this country is a waste of time” or “social progress doesn’t happen in this society” are both intellectually dishonest and intellectually lazy; they’re engaging in a tactic of unconscious self-aggrandizement, casting about for a chance to sound important without doing the work (and perhaps without having the mental means) to justify their outrageous, easily disproven claims. They repeat logical fallacies with a dismissive smugness that they suppose disarms argument. Their claims are so broad and all inclusive they momentarily mask vagueness behind the appearance of cleaving the Gordian Knot; they mask hollowness behind the appearance of incisiveness.

They are either unable to follow up after being challenged with facts, or they do it only with an internet link to an opinion piece–it may happen that, in their patronizing way, before vanishing, they toss off an observation that, for example, “both Democrats and Republicans voted for the Iraq war”, as if that proved that the parties always have the same policies. If we respond by demonstrating that, again and again, Democrats and Republicans have overwhelmingly different policies with different results, that voting for Obama resulted in our taking our troops out of Iraq, that Civil Rights laws represent progress, that the word progress is not a synonym for perfection…well, they quickly bail out.

Really, these people are engaging in a cocktail-party-social, interpersonal gambit, not a political one; they’re trying to make a striking statement without having to defend it, and they’re hoping to harvest a gratifying attention for it. It’s flailing for one-upmanship. The tendency has replicated in social media, spread like a contagious skin disease on the internet…

I sometimes think that there’s been a coup in the USA but it’s not a military coup or a “right wing coup” (per se). It’s a fossil fuels industry take over, first in congress, and now complete with Trump’s election. “It’s been like that for years,” some glib person is going to claim, probably citing too much Obama/Clinton etc friendliness to fracking. The thought was, fracking was associated with more natural gas, natural gas was associated with “clean” energy, as it burnt fairly clean, so more natural gas instead of coal, say, would reduce greenhouse gases; hence, despite some problems, it seemed a net win. But actually it’s heavily polluting and may well cause earthquakes.

So supporting fracking was an error. But on the whole, Obama kept the oil companies in check. It is Trump who’s initiated their true coup.

WONDER WOMAN’S GAL GADOT as well as MAYIM BIALIK are getting anti-semitic tweets and comments because they support Israel as a Jewish Homeland; Gadot, an Israeli, gets abuse because she served in the Israel Defense Forces as a combat trainer. The dictionary defines Zionism as “a movement for (originally) the re-establishment and (now) the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel.” Zionism should be kept in context with the natural and rightful determination of Jewish people to *remember the Holocaust*. The Jewish homeland, Israel, is a place that militates, literally, against a new Holocaust. This doesn’t mean that Israel doesn’t currently have bad leadership, that it doesn’t harbor some prejudicial people–some of the settlers in disputed territories and the ultra-Orthodox for example are excessive, perhaps racist, and disrespectful of human rights. So is the current Israeli Prime Minister. So challenge those people. Do you dispute America’s right to exist, to be defended, just because we happen to have an idiot for a President right now? No. Extend the same courtesy to Israel.

I believe there should be a freeze on territorial expansion of Israel, and a broad recognition of Palestine as a nation. But Israelis being slow to get to that point does not mean they are wrong to serve in the IDF; it does not mean they’re wrong to want to protect Israel. Same goes for American Jews who are pro-Israel–if they’re Zionist, it’s in the original meaning of the word, not in some code usage spread by anti-semites and intolerant people on the left who have unreasonably equated the concept of Zionism with the right-wing.

Mayim Bialik is too intelligent to be prejudiced against Arabic peoples. “Zionism is the belief in the right of the Jewish people to have an autonomous state in Israel,” Bialik — a star in the CBS comedy series “The Big Bang Theory” and a distant relative of the late famous Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik — wrote on her GrokNation website. “I am a Zionist. Feminism is the belief that a woman-driven movement can bring about race, class and gender equality and that women deserve all of the rights and privileges afforded to men. I am a feminist.”

We need to stand up to those who blurt anti-semitism in social media and elsewhere. I stand with Mayim–and with Wonder Woman!

Three encounters with wildlife in my neighborhood. I was walking the dogs yesterday morn, blustery but pleasant day, and saw a chubby robin tugging a truly enormous wriggling earthworm clamped in its beak, dragging it along the sidewalk like a fireman pulling a hose. The robin spotted me, about ten feet away; it froze, then, and–looking as bereft and resigned as a bird can look–dropped the worm and fluttered over into a lawn. There it alit and froze again, staring at me, its head cocked. I said, “Robin dude, you can have your worm, it’s cool.” (I did say that. My neighbors often witness me talking to animals like this and stare at me almost like the bird did.) Then I drew the dogs off the walk into the street, way over to one side, circling around the writhing worm and the watching bird. The bird’s head turned to watch me–then when I’d gone far enough away, it hopped over to the worm, and took it up again in just the same way. It had thought this out, it seems. And we were cool.

I was washing dishes and heard a thump on a nearby window–and it was a particular soft but emphatic thump that I know too well. The sound of a bird accidentally flying headlong into glass. As many as 900 million birds a year are thought to die that way. But they don’t always perish. I went out to see, and saw a lark half flopped on the ground, one wing extended–and this bird too was staring at me, in fear. I went to it and gathered it up in my two hands as gently as possible, and took it to a gardening shed out back, set it on a shelf on an old folded up rug. Then I left the shed, the door cracked open, but not too much, so it could recover, if it did, in the dark. I went back a little later–it was in the same spot, but when it saw me it fluttered into a corner. Did not seem to have a broken wing. I left the door open wider. Came back an hour later, it was gone, and I saw no signs of it, no feathers from a cat attack, nothing, and I think it recovered from, perhaps, a concussion of sorts, and flew off.

Walking the dogs that night, I saw a car pull up rather abruptly in front of a small house, a guy with silky looking athletic shorts and a sleeveless shirt and a short beard, his head shaved close, got out of the driver’s side, cussing, and a young woman who, I felt, was likely his wife, got out on the other side. The guy snarled at her, “You fucking dog cunt!” and threw the keys in his hand furiously at the lawn. He stomped up to the front door, as behind his back she grabbed the keys from the lawn, yelled something at him, got in the car as he turned back to her from the porch. “You’re fucking leaving? Good!” She drove off, he turned and tried the door. Then yelled. “Fuck!” The door was locked. Ah, wildlife.

It’s not going to be like Nixon–there’s no way to force Trump to resign. Not without Comey. This is not your old man’s Republican Party. They are going to keep Trump as long as they can, because he’s giving them everything they want. He’s given them Gorsuch. He’s given them an interior dept secretary who is trying to undo Obama’s national monument declarations, so they can take the wilderness and tribal land that the Obama admin protected, and give it to the oil and coal and mining and real estate developers. He’s letting Pruitt gut the EPA, so the GOP’s owners can pollute as they please. He’s getting rid of scientific advisors. He’s doing his damnedest to get rid of “Obamacare”. He’s got three people associated with Goldman Sachs at the top of his administration and he’s working with the GOP to try to get rid of what few regulations constrain Wall Street. He’s going to say yes to the whole right-wing corporate agenda. He’s sounding more and more religious right. He’s going all out to weaken the objective news media. So they’re NOT going to get rid of him.

No investigation is going to go forward in any way that will hurt Trump–not without someone at the top who’s not a puppet at the Justice Dept.

Hence the only hope is voting. But Trump is going to do what he can to suppress votes. He can be stopped if enough people fight for voter’s rights, and *if enough people vote* in 2018 congressional elections, and if enough people vote in the Presidential election of 2020.